Description

Portugal’s first public museum of contemporary art lies on the outskirts of a large park. The 160-metre long building, for the most part four storeys, is fitted into the sloping landscape so that its enormous volume can hardly be guessed at from the entrance area – at best, its size could be gauged by walking round the outside. Between two slices of wall that are penetrated only by window openings and a bridge into the park are situated (apart from a two-storey underground garage with a grass roof) the auditorium that belongs to the complex and, separated from it by a courtyard, the U-shaped museum itself, with two asymmetric wings around another courtyard opening to the park.

The quality of this architecture consists in the tension between regularity and carefully calculated discomfiture, in the interplay between inside and outside, in the visitor routing, and not least in the treatment of light. The long trajectory that leads from the exterior portal to the actual museum entrance already brings into focus significant elements almost as leitmotifs: it begins with a bend which is transferred to the third dimension in the fracturing of the roofing at the portal into multiple obtuse angles, making it immediately clear to those entering that spatial laws are being demonstrated here and at the same time, relativized by their reduction to a play of sharply-drawn lines. The trajectory staged in this way, carefully set off from the green lawn by stone slabs and roofed over, its further course narrowed and rhythmicized by the gatehouse placed at an angle, leads – first on the one side hermetically closed by a wall, but on the other side entirely open – past a large inner courtyard bounded on its south side by the immaculate white wall of the auditorium. While this windowless wall, the effect of which is inhospitable despite the elegance of its curving roofline, suggests that the visitor is still outside the building, the windowed walls, some of them angled, lend the neighbouring courtyard placed between the auditorium and the actual museum a significantly more intimate character that appears to blur the boundary between external and internal space. At many places in the building the interplay between inside and outside becomes a dialogue between architecture and nature carefully staged by means of refined wall cut-outs, room-high window openings or oriels that are occasionally twisted out of the walls in sharp, balcony-like angles.

The interior of the museum – accessed by the route taking visitors from the two-storey high atrium on a labyrinthine excursion leading occasionally via stairways and ramps and interrupted repeatedly by views of the complex – consists of seven large and a series of smaller rooms, each of which has a specific character created by variations in their dimensions and proportions as well as the form and size of the wall and ceiling openings. However, light plays the most important role: its incidence is subtly directed and its targeted nuancing by means of a multiplicity of reflections and refractions of the spatial boundaries, always white, allow this architecture sometimes to appear weightless. The fragmentation of the prismatic stereometry – never obtrusively staged, yet unmistakable – contributes decisively to the impression of this lightness that allows one to almost forget the structural necessities, which are nowhere put on display. However, on no account does this fragmentation of the prismatic stereometry take on deconstructionist traits. The rooms are often bounded not by wall and ceiling surfaces in the traditional sense, but instead seem to develop a life of their own that now and then shifts right angles, interrupts walls by means of oriel-like protrusions or sometimes makes them appear to be tilted, and again and again alienates the ceilings – at times in counterpoint to varying floor levels – by means of multiple layerings, to the extent that the light effects thereby created seem to overrule spatial laws. In addition to several rooms in which the ceilings are virtually ‘turned upside down’ by ‘hanging tables,’ out of which indirect light falls on the walls, there are also conventional rooms lit from above, whose glass ceilings are not flat, however, but slightly swollen like sails. Herein too, we see Siza’s unmistakeable style – as we do in the organically curved contour of the auditorium wall – that is probably to be explained not only by the admired model provided by Alvar Aalto, but is also perhaps to be interpreted as an expression of that mentality that has its linguistic equivalent in the soft ductus of Portuguese. The fact that these thoroughly manneristic characteristics of Alvaro Siza’s language of form do not detract from the functional capabilities of his buildings, but instead are able to intensify them, is proven here, for example, by the largely asymmetric arrangement of the doors of the museum’s rooms, whose spatial sequence, almost always regular and therefore conventionally appropriate for museums, is thereby eventfully alienated and often found surprising. The routing, already intentionally emphasized in the entrance area thus proves to be not only an important architectural motif, but also at the same time an effective solution to a central problem of museum architecture as such.

Baumeister 7/1999, pp. 6-7 (Gerd Hammer) • Bauwelt 32/ 1999, pp. 1739-1747 (Christian Gänshirt) • Deutsche Bauzeitung 9/1999, pp. 96-103 (David Cohn) • The Architectural Review 1230/1999, pp. 32-33 (Guy Marc) • Philip Jodidio, Álvaro Siza, Cologne, 1999, pp. 164-167 • architektur aktuell 237-238/2000, pp. 144-156 (Paul von Naredi-Rainer) • Álvaro Siza. Museu de Serralves/Serralves Museum (Paulo Martins Barata, Raquel Henriques de Silva, Bernardo Pinto de Almeida), Lisbon, 2001 • James Grayson Trulove, Designing the new museum. Building a new destination, Gloucester/MA, 2000, pp. 70-79 • Frank Maier-Solgk, Die neuen Museen, Cologne, 2002, pp. 200-205

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.